Industry’s Only Integrated Active Antenna, RF System, and Chip Modules Enable Vendors to Bring High-Performance M2M Solutions to Market.
Ethertronics, a leading technology company enabling innovative active antenna and RF system solutions to deliver the best connected experience, is showcasing its industry-leading, plug-and-play M2M solutions – including EtherModule 1.0™ and EtherLTE™ – this week during CTIA 2013 in Las Vegas.
EtherModule 1.0 leverages Ethertronics’ extensive expertise in advanced antenna architecture, RF systems, and chip design to deliver the industry’s only plug-and-play module for M2M solutions. EtherLTE is the only integrated, plug-and-play active antenna system for M2M modules covering 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE.
Given their plug-and-play designs, both EtherModule 1.0 and EtherLTE enable product designers to quickly deliver high-performance M2M designs in very small form factors, while overcoming challenging RF environments, such as frequency drifts, environmental effects, and hand and head effects.
“The expanding M2M market demands a wide range of solutions – from utility meters to medical devices. Regardless of their intended application, every M2M product needs to be capable of maintaining wireless connectivity across a range of frequencies and operating environments.”
Olivier Robin, General Manager Americas and Europe for Ethertronics, said:
“By leveraging our extensive experience in antennas, RF systems, and chips, we are able to provide plug-and-play solutions capable of mitigating the common integration woes that many vendors face, and let them focus on their core competencies in bringing high-performance M2M solutions to market.”
EtherModule 1.0 – a turnkey, plug-and-play active antenna system module – addresses the challenges facing today’s product designers for M2M applications and other wireless devices. Combining Ethertronics’ advanced antenna architecture and its proprietary EtherChip 1.0™ tunable capacitor gives Ethertronics full control of the optimization and enables easy integration in any M2M device. EtherModule 1.0 is a highly modular and optimized broad band self-tuning antenna solution enabling integration in any M2M device. Given the combination of closed loop functionality with a proprietary algorithm integrated in conjunction with a microprocessor, the module is capable of dynamically sensing and optimizing the antenna system, without external control signals from the device. This approach provides tuning capability; seamlessly adjusting the characteristics of the antenna to its dynamic requirements – including frequency shift, hand, head and environmental effects, or more bandwidth. EtherModule 1.0 minimizes the need for additional engineering design time and gets M2M products to market faster.
Its compact size at 35x15x10mm and ability to cover a wide range of frequency needs – from 100MHz up to several GHz covering 2G, 3G, 4G cellular as well as Bluetooth, ISM, WiFi, and ZigBee bands – make it ideal for M2M devices. The active antenna system technologies behind EtherModule 1.0 have been commercially integrated into products, where high performance and reliability are critical, such as an automated medicine dispenser and cabinet, enabling accurate readings even in the most challenging RF environments, ensuring medication is available and verifying that the correct medication is dispensed and administered.
EtherLTE is a PCB antenna with all components integrated into a single plug-and-play active antenna solution. By utilizing Active Band Switching techniques, EtherLTE is able to cover the lower cellular and LTE frequency bands at 700-960MHz, as well as the higher bands at 1710-2170MHz. At 44.0×10.0x3.3mm, the compact antenna system can be easily integrated into smaller form factors.
Robin continued, “Providing M2M vendors with a single plug-and-play solution – whether through our module or active antenna system – significantly speeds vendor’s time-to-market. Not only do they have the convenience of working with a single provider, they don’t need to worry about how to design and integrate an antenna solution since we’ve already done that back-end work for them. In the case of EtherModule 1.0, M2M vendors simply need to connect the RF and supply DC power to enable wireless connectivity in their M2M products – a significant benefit to them and their customers.”
